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<TITLE>Transformations Issue 14 'Accidental Environments' now out</TITLE>
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<FONT SIZE="2"><FONT FACE="Monaco, Courier New"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:10.0px'>Transformations announces the publication of Issue 14 - March 2007<BR>
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ACCIDENTAL ENVIRONMENTS<BR>
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“The Accident is not an exception or a sickness of our apolitical regimes; nor it is a correctable defect of our civilization: it is the natural consequence of our science, our politics, and our morality.”<BR>
— Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions.<BR>
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Our lives are filled with accidents, from the mundanity of spilled milk and a slip of the tongue, to large-scale, mediated and mediatized accidents; here we sit, glued to the screens, as increasing numbers of unruly cyclones smash into tropical coasts, as Black-Hawk helicopters fall out of Iraqi and Afghani skies, as friendly-fire death reports issue from the war-zones of the Middle-East, as narcotized teenagers suicide on the side-effects of their over-prescribed anti-depressants. Representations of the accident span the highs and lows of culture; there is a popular culture of the accident and the disaster – remember when The Coast was Toast!? – and an avant-garde culture of chance and aleatoric production. There is a discourse and an aesthetic of the accident, a mode of concerned and shocked reportage and a standard plot-line by which to invite the accident in, to excite, abreact and entertain. Accidents are events, and they produce events, they are constituted within spectacular milieux.<BR>
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Accidents are generally understood to happen by chance. They are seen as the mark of a failure to maintain control of an environment, or as the unexpected outcome of “natural” environmental occurrences. But perhaps accidents can be seen in another way, as productive, in the sense that seemingly incongruous things and events coincide or collide and together create possibilities and release potentials. Or maybe, as Octavio Paz suggests, they’re not accidents at all! In a world that is increasingly reliant on technological means of knowing and doing, accidents come thick and fast, and the accidentality of the accident is brought soundly into question.<BR>
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ARTICLES:<BR>
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Cruel Weather: Natural Disasters and Structural Violence<BR>
Dennis Soron<BR>
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Machine Breaths: Assembling the Mechanical Ventilator Body<BR>
Bjorn Nansen<BR>
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Toxic Shock: Gendered Environments and Embodied Knowledge in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Todd Haynes’s [Safe]<BR>
Rachel Carroll<BR>
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Calculated Uncertainty: Computers, Chance Encounters, and "Community" in the Work of Cedric Price'<BR>
Rowan Wilken<BR>
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The Accidental Topology of Digital Culture: How the Network Becomes Viral<BR>
Tony Sampson<BR>
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Accidental Participation in Control, in the Small of Society<BR>
Don Winiecki<BR>
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Access at<BR>
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<FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><U><a href="http://transformations.cqu.edu.au">http://transformations.cqu.edu.au</a><BR>
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The Editors<BR>
</SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11.0px'>Regards<BR>
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Warwick<BR>
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Dr. Warwick Mules<BR>
General Editor, Transformations <a href="http://transformations.cqu.edu.au">http://transformations.cqu.edu.au</a><BR>
Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies<BR>
Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Education<BR>
Central Queensland University<BR>
Bundaberg Campus<BR>
Bundaberg Queensland 4670<BR>
Australia<BR>
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer<BR>
School of English, Media and Art History<BR>
University of Queensland<BR>
Australia<BR>
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Phone: 07 41507142<BR>
Fax: 07 41507090<BR>
Mobile: 0412292541<BR>
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